Toolkits are an important means of sharing expertise and influencing practice. However, the work of making and sustaining toolkits is not well understood. We address this gap by conducting 20 semi-structured interviews with toolkit designers, focusing on toolkits intended to help practitioners such as librarians, teachers, and community workers. We analyze these interviews to surface key aspects of participants’ design journeys: (1) how their projects began; (2) how they conceptualized use; (3) how they collaborated with users; (4) and what happened once their toolkit was released. We illustrate these aspects through three narratives, and discuss our findings to provide considerations for designers and scholars. We highlight how designers co-construct communities alongside their toolkits, helping us form a more nuanced understanding of the social aspects underpinning toolkit projects. Collectively, these contributions can help us identify challenges and opportunities in this design space, laying the groundwork to increase toolkits’ social impact.

This Innovative Professional Practice paper reflects a work in progress. Many in engineering education are interested in the dual issues of how to support engineering education change and how to disseminate and share ideas that others can use on their quest to change. Toolkits are quickly emerging as a genre for sharing that addresses dissemination goals while also respecting the agency of those involved in change efforts. This paper describes a toolkit formation process that utilizes co-design. The toolkit is intended as a means of disseminating transferable activities in a major educational grant funded by the National Science Foundation. The paper includes traces of our efforts in deciding toolkit and co-design workshop contents, the challenges we experienced, and the decisions we made and remade. We anticipate this paper provides a case from which those interested in creating toolkits can gain inspiration. We also anticipate that our case can be used to seed a conversation about toolkit creation that centers on the goals, the steps, and the outcomes.

Will the change last? In higher education, many of us put considerable efforts into program, curriculum, and educational reforms that lead to reasonable improvement. With each reform comes the challenge of sustaining the change. How do we assess how, or even if, to make the change last? To the authors’ best knowledge, no validated model to guide such assessment exists. The authors propose one. Based on systemic study of our current and previous work on educational reform and the literature, we present a framework that assesses the sustainability of a program, curricular, or pedagogical change. In this special session, we will not only present this framework and demonstrate its usability in two different cases, but we also will guide attendees in applying this framework to assess the sustainability of their own changes. We will involve attendees in the design process of testing and further improving the framework to determine, "Will the change last?"

In this Work in Progress, we detail the piloting of a virtual co-design session as an Innovative Practice between students and faculty who were invited to co-create inclusive classroom norms. In these co-design sessions, participants identified exclusive practices they had previously seen or experienced and then came together to create inclusive norms that addressed these observed practices. This is relevant to engineering education as we seek to create more inclusive learning environments. In the first 20-minute co-design sessions, faculty designed among themselves as did students, each group in a separate breakout session. In the second session, all participants worked together in the same room. The full one-hour session was followed by an open-ended survey. The data analyzed includes the survey results, ideation artifacts, and the final list of norms. The research team aided in scaffolding the sessions and facilitating the discussions. Each research team member reflected on their positionality as observers of the interaction. This work in progress contributes insights into structuring co-design sessions that take into account and address differing power dynamics and also identifies ways power dynamics inadvertently show up in student-faculty interactions, including student-student and faculty-faculty interactions.

The Anonymous University Mechanical Engineering department was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to revolutionize its undergraduate program. The goal of the grant is to implement department wide changes that create a focus on doing engineering with engineers and fosters stronger engineering identities in students and faculty. One area of change is the program’s curriculum. This paper describes how the Electrical Engineering Fundamentals course was integrated into the Mechanical Engineering Instrumentation and Data Acquisition (DAQ) course with the goal of creating connections between electrical engineering concepts and applications in mechanical engineering. Design and implementation of this course sequence are presented. Assessment and evaluation methods are also discussed.

This panel session combines principles from graduate student socialization and intergenerational mentorship to provide a unique opportunity for early career scholars and pioneers in engineering education to interact face-to-face. Pioneers will serve as panelists and give their personal tips and reflections on networking and mentorship. Session attendees will then meet with the pioneers in a roundtable format, to ask questions, seek advice, and get feedback. This work builds on the National Science Foundation-funded Engineering Education Pioneers Project, which documented the stories of more than 40 engineering education pioneers through online profiles. The intended audience for this panel includes graduate students, junior faculty, and other individuals interested in the engineering education community. Expected benefits include better understanding, increased belonging, and new or enhanced interest in engineering education. Future efforts associated with this session include understanding the impact of such exposure to the pioneers on attendees and exploring the possibility of offering this event at future engineering education conferences.

Using a research-to-practice model to teach undergraduate engineering students about the design process, we adopted a classroom activity that used design process data derived from research and represented in the form of timelines as an advance organizer to facilitate student learning. We also developed a set of assignments, including some where students created and shared their own representations of the design process. In this "work in progress" paper, we report on a small, qualitative study of how students responded to these materials, which are designed to focus attention on design processes rather than on design outcomes (e.g., products). We present visual representations that two of the students created in response to three assignments to demonstrate the diverse ways in which the assignments can be carried out and to illustrate how a focus on the design process itself promotes individual learning. In addition, we present a preliminary coding of the assignments for these two students as to whether the concepts covered in the classroom activity and assignments appeared in the student work. This is intended to act as a baseline measure of the effectiveness of the materials to teach design.

In recent years, the engineering education community has invested significant energy and resources in the creation of a rigorous empirical knowledge base to support the transformation of engineering education practice. In this work, we address the specific question: When researchers identify practical implications in their research publications, what specific actions are they suggesting be done, and who is expected to take these actions? We answer this question by identifying "implication for action" sentences in a sample of sixteen articles across two issues of the Journal of Engineering Education. We find that the actions offered are infrequently cognitive (15% in our dataset) and frequently related to courses (83% in our dataset); and the identification of an actor happens just under half of the time (43% in our dataset). We discuss these results through a pragmatic perspective and a critical perspective.

This special session will provide participants with the opportunity to: (1) gain a deeper understanding of the nature, significance, and complexities associated with the use of reflection in engineering education, (2) engage with other engineering educators around the issues and challenges of reflection, (3) become familiar with a framework for characterizing reflection and identifying reflection activities, and (4) work with other engineering educators to design/develop reflection activities that may be appropriate to specific educational contexts.

The objective of this work is to explore how implications for educational practice are represented in the scholarly literature of engineering education. This work is motivated by the increasing urgency to understand how research can be used to transform educational practice. Because scholarly writing (such as conference papers and journal articles) represents one place where researchers articulate ideas about how their research can be used (i.e., educational implications), an analysis of how such implications are represented can provide insight into ideas about the uses we imagine for our research. Once we have characterized the vision of use, we can step back and think about whether the collective vision we present may provide clues to the more general issue of transforming education.

Recent work in engineering education has made it clear that for students to be prepared to function effectively as engineers, they will need to acquire a diverse set of competencies by the time they graduate. In this research, we explored students' experiences with an innovative pedagogy - a competency-specific, engineering-preparedness portfolio studio - as a means to support students in being prepared with respect to specific competencies. In this work, we showed that when given the opportunity to choose, students select a range of competencies for quite sophisticated reasons. Furthermore, when in this studio environment for multiple experiences, students engaged in deeper reflection and meaning making about prior experiences. Finally, through this environment students supported one another through formal and informal peer learning.

This paper looks at characteristics of a studio environment and the ways in which engineering pedagogies can begin to incorporate them. Using inductive coding, student reflection forms, in which students described their experiences with a studio environment as they developed professional portfolios, are analyzed. Based on our findings and using communities of practice and complexity theory as a theoretical lens, we describe how portfolio studios engage students in key elements of learning. In particular, the analysis of students' reflection forms demonstrates that students validate each other's experiences through peer interaction, engage in the negotiation of meaning, and make sense of their own identity. The paper provides insights into studio environments and their role in engineering education, an explanation of our research methodology, the results, a discussion of the results and the ways in which they relate to communities of practice and complexity theory, and a conclusion focused on possible implications.

This study followed the introduction of the Arthritis Source website into the existing teaching practices of Arthritis Foundation Helpline volunteers. The goal was to examine what factors may affect a particular group of educators adopt a potentially valuable Internet tool into an existing instructional environment. Defining the possible uses of the website in reference to the volunteers' actual job duties helped provide a clearer understanding of how the volunteers might use this new technology. The researchers used qualitative techniques to focus on three volunteers who experienced different physical, environmental and cognitive means that impacted their use of the new tool. Each volunteer experienced varying levels of motivation in areas of learning, satisfaction and responses to outside influences. Each volunteer also had varying amounts of opportunity prompts in which to interact or refer the website. Consequently, Helpline volunteers experienced different rates of adopting the information-intensive website into their traditional work system.